Semiconductor production environments are typically highly controlled to suppress contamination of wafers with foreign materials that may interfere with the fabrication process or degrade the performance of fabricated devices. Inspection systems are commonly used to locate defects such as, but not limited to, foreign particles on a substrate for screening and avoidance measures. For example, unprocessed wafers may be screened prior to production to select only suitable wafers or to identify defect sites on wafers for production. It may additionally be desirable to classify the material composition of identified defects to determine appropriate cleaning or avoidance steps throughout the fabrication process. However, decreases in the size of fabricated features drive a need to detect and classify ever smaller defects on substrates, which may present challenges for sensitivity and throughput of inspection systems. Therefore, there exists a critical need to develop systems and methods to detect small particles in wafer inspection systems.